Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), Chairman of the House Administration Committee, introduced a sweeping legislative package securing U.S. elections. The bill, called the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, creates requirements for state election officials.
The legislation requires a photo ID to vote, verification of U.S. citizenship, demands that mail-in ballots be received by the end of Election Day, accurate voter rolls, and the use of paper ballots. It also prohibits ballot harvesting, ranked-choice voting, and universal vote by mail.
According to the bill, “The voting system shall require the use of a paper ballot manually marked by the voter or a paper ballot marked through the use of a nontabulating ballot marking device or system, so long as the voter shall have the option at every in-person voting location to manually mark a printed ballot that includes all relevant contests and candidates.”
“Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” Steil said in a statement on the legislation. “These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”
The bill stands in support of President Trump’s 2025 executive order to secure the nation’s elections. The order, called “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” said, “Under the Constitution, State governments must safeguard American elections in compliance with Federal laws that protect Americans’ voting rights and guard against dilution by illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error,” the order reads. “Yet the United States has not adequately enforced Federal election requirements that, for example, prohibit States from counting ballots received after Election Day or prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.”
The order called for voter-verifiable paper ballot record.
